Barn Raising at Hitachi Data Systems: Removing Barriers to Participation in Social Knowledge Co-Creation

Topics: Social Learning

The fiercening of competition in our globally-connected world has accelerated the need to release products more quickly and innovate products and services to take advantage of emerging opportunities. The struggle for companies to reorganize for constant change has resulted in many oft-told tales: complaints about out-of-date documentation, confusion as to where one finds the latest documents, increased on-boarding time needed to familiarize new employees with the materials, inconsistent customer service on account of an uneven distribution of knowledge across the enterprise. The internal problem to be able to adjust quickly, often has little to do with not having technology, but having too many disconnected technology platforms or too many unconnected processes across the enterprise. 

At Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), the proliferation of Sharepoint sites combined with innumerable local repositories maintained on individual hard drives affected more than 500 customer-facing employees and co-providers being able to deliver professional services more effectively and efficiently. For HDS, the choke-point was that the number of new products increased and the method for capturing and disseminating this information could not keep up. To address this need, HDS applied crowdsourcing to internal knowledge capturing and sharing. Crowdsourcing, as a concept, wasn't hard for people to get; but changing the culture to achieve this outcome required re-thinking the role of learning professionals and knowledge sharing across the enterprise. The adjustments addressed the needs for better access to the latest knowledge while improving the culture and connecting groups separated by time zones, countries, and functions. 

Members of CorpU can read more detail about specific implementation approaches, challenges encountered, adjustments made, and lessons learned to date.

Reconceiving Roles, Rethinking Assets

When Jeff Maaks considered his situation, he looked first at the role of the HDS Global Solution Services team. Leveraging crowdsourcing would create a new responsibility for the already overstretched team. To overcome any resistance, Jeff recognized that he needed to help the team discover the benefits in taking on a new role as facilitators and as connectors, bringing together the collective know-how of the globally distributed organization and in the process give up some of the structured, rote work process that hadn't been meeting the needs of the company. It also required reconsidering the structure of content: rather than approach knowledge production as a discrete process — where they captured the steps, documented the process, and packaged the material as a self-contained implementation kit, with independent kits for each use case or specific context — they would need to adjusted to allow for continuous updating by the community of the parts likely to change. 

Don't Confuse Selling with Doing

One important lesson learned along the way was to spend the time to clarify what you'd like crowdsourced. In HDS's case, they were looking to leverage the collective wisdom and genius of hundreds of service engineers who knew different aspects of the product, and they wanted to make it easy to reuse discrete how-to-use information into different kits that could be bundled and sold based on specific use cases.

What are marketed and sold to customers as packaged services is inherently different from the knowledge needed to perform the service. In other words, they perceived that you don't want to crowdsource what you're marketing and selling. You want to crowd-source the steps, and make it easy for people to update the steps when new knowledge changes. This allowed HDS to have two distinct uses of the repository: (1) as a way for field technicians to get to know what was possible and how, and (2) as a way for sales and marketing to custom bundle implementation kits for specific use-cases. 

From Implementation Kit Creation to Curating Technical Capability Information

The team at HDS Global Solution Services - Services Engineering Team recognized that they needed to change their orientation. Instead of being responsible for creating the content, they needed to be responsible for creating the organization and the structure for the work, and the facilitation to leverage the collective knowledge across the company. Like traditional curators, they aren’t the artists, but rather help organize and structure the work, facilitating collaboration and providing the required infrastructure. 

The Service Engineering team would continue to produce the new materials as they were coming out of product development, but they needed a way to keep all of the information about the legacy products as up-to-date as possible.

If You Build It, They Will Not Necessarily Come

Once they wrapped their heads around the new role, the staff at HDS began moving content out of the read-only SharePoint site and into a read/write space in Jive. Everything was brought over, a few slight, modest adjustments were made, and they sent out an announcement to encourage field technicians to contribute.

Not much happened.

"Barn Raising" To Help Shift Culture

Initially discouraged, the team went back to the drawing board. They came to realize that the idea wasn't wrong, but the execution was. Or more specifically, they means to invite people to participate was.

At the time, one of the leaders had been reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, and noted that the challenge was that the community was not integrated in the effort. So, in order to begin the process of changing the culture from being passive consumers of content on the site to active stakeholders in the collective knowledge in the repository, they decided to brand a series of off-site events focused on a few key issues at a time, to help integrate the updating of content. They called them barn raisings, reflecting the Amish custom of people coming together in the community to raise a new barn. 

Some Features of HDS Barn Raising Events

They recognized that the barriers to participation were what needed to be overcome in creating this new culture. A quick survey indicated that the typical culprits were at play:

• Not enough time (62%)
• Nothing to contribute (18%)
• Confusion about other tools (18%)
• Learning curve / need training (16%)
• Other (52%)
   - Missing information / old content
   - No remote access
   - Difficult to navigate / find information
   - Slow response time

The design of the barn raising events is worth noting as to how they addressed these concerns:

• 4-day offsite meeting, with targeted content tracks
  (site rotated, to be nearer to different field offices, but with sufficient restaurants to make sure that initial first night dinner had each group at different restaurants)
• Bring field technical experts together across silos, representing a broad cross section of people in the field
   - experts in certain areas, but different geographical areas
   - bring in different levels, as "newbies" call attention to skipped steps in the process
   - selection done hand-in-hand with field line management
• Run 4 or 5 tracks in parallel with about 5 people per track — but do not overly structure tracks
   - Topics are business-driven: areas where knowledge base is behind, doesn't have enough content, or is needed to help ramp-up capabilities
   - Topics are chosen in direct consultation, using weekly touch-base calls followed up by emails
   - Topics need to take into consideration whether it makes good business sense, whether there are enough experts to be able to work offsite, whether it aligns with corporate initiatives, etc.
• Bring business leaders and field managers in to participate, one per track, to help keep the conversations on track
   - Use one member of the HDS Global Solution Services - Services Engineering Team per event to keep the logisitics on track
   - Bring in all people in a large room initially on first day to explain the reasons why, the expectations, what will happen
   - Make sure to arrange first night meal so that each track is together at different restaurants, to let them gel as a team
   - Keep each track in different rooms after initial day to work (with meals, technology, etc, all available for them to work in that room)
   - Provide short session at end of day to let each team share progress, create a sense of urgency, cross-pollinate, and encourage a one-upping
   - Provide a dinner with all participants at end of week 

• Survey the participants before they leave on the last day
   - Name
   - Which track(s) attended?
   - What worked well that we should make sure we do again?
   - What didn't work that we should do differently?
   - General comments?
   - Please provide a quote that we can use to justify these events

Critical Design Features

The critical design features of HDS barn raising are what make it effective as a tool to establish a crowd-sourced approach:

1. Offsite, offline
   - ensures focused time away from daily distractions
   - creates opportunity to network and to work with managers from other units
   - enables creation / capture of substantial content in a short amount of time 
   - position as a reward, exclusive event
2. Showcasing
    - encourages groups to show progress during week
    - creates slightly competitive environment
    - keeps all abreast of effort
3. Carefully select first groups and recycle 20% from last event to next event 
   - bring the heavy participants in to establish the event and create early wins
   - 20% ensures continuity from event to event
   - ensures that culture begins to form by having a few people participate in subsequent events
4. Monitor post-events
    - recognize and encourage right behavior
    - track participation in the repository
5. The "usual suspects" to make projects successful in a large organization
    - Find the champion dedicated to driving the overall community (needs credibility, management support, and budget)
    - Key stakeholder buy-in and explicit support
    - Clear agreement of business benefits, ultimate goals
    - It meets a real need for the users
    - Barriers to participate are addressed, removed, or overcome wherever possible
    - Don't worry about pleasing everyone
    - Focus first on desired behaviors, not business metrics
    - Survey participants and circulate the responses 
    - Communicate, communicate, communicate 

Some Lessons Learned

Five critical lessons were picked up along the way, and these can be applied to most applications of the approach to companies in different industries and geographies:

1. Use field-based middle-managers to facilitate the tracks.
    Helps build reward aspect of event (one-on-one time with managers from across the company) and reflects the broad basis of support

2. Make sure to select off-site attendees to represent different field locations.
    A broader representation helps break down silos

3. Communicate, communicate, communicate.
    Keep the field managers informed, keep the staff aware, and keep building on success 

4. Front-load the first events with likely early adopters or people likely to share practices.
    Helps assure that the initial culture starts well and gathers some momentum 

5. Gradually integrate some nay-sayers, or those reluctant to share, into the next series of events
    Helps bring about gradual cultural shift and broader reach

Things To Be Done Differently 

Along the way, the team discovered that the following adjustments would have made for a better initial rollout of barn raising to help change culture and launch a crowd-sourced approach toward materials to have made it more effective:

• Spend more time cleaning up the content so that the initial seeded content makes it clear what it's supposed to look like
• Enlist content leads from across organization
• Create better training materials on (e.g., using Jive and Sharepoint) to be made available before they come to events
• More WebEx sessions during initial rollout
• More videos on how to use the platform

Some Insight about Crowdsourcing

Though the practice documented here at HDS focused primarily on internal knowledge management to improve service delivery, crowdsourcing can be applied across the organization. In the box below is some insight in applying crowdsourcing product innovation (based on the Dell example). 

Additional References

Neilsen, Jakob. "Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute."

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

Shirky, Clay. TED Talk: Institutions vs Collaboration.

Sivers, Derek. Obvious to you, Amazing to Others.